


salt burns the wound

by galactics



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: F/F, Hurt/Comfort, Romance, mentions of violence/gore
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-13
Updated: 2017-05-13
Packaged: 2018-10-31 04:19:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,625
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10891560
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/galactics/pseuds/galactics
Summary: Amélie examines photographs, Satya examines Amélie.





	salt burns the wound

**Author's Note:**

  * For [HaxanHexes (PineNeedles)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/PineNeedles/gifts).



Forgetting is a cruel thing to force upon someone. Amélie ought to know. She forgot everything in a few days, when they wiped her clean and built a puppet from what remained. The Widowmaker. Her name was description enough. She left behind bastions of ruined spouses, both women and men, a mountain of bodies, a river of blood—all without realizing a thing about her former life.

It’s an irony, then, her grasping old photographs on the floor of her apartment, remembering the things that they made her forget.

There’s a box full of them. Some were taken by her parents—these are all her as a child, skinny and overworked. It’s a crime how pronounced her eyebags were at twelve. Some were taken by her friends, and those are blurry and full of wine and gift bows. They were all high society people, friends of friends of the family that she floated between like a wisp of a thing.

Most are taken by Gérard. He took too many photographs, all with a classic film camera, so many that they simply couldn’t develop them all. They had a dark room in their home that was scarcely used, Gerard was absent so often, and when he was home, he couldn’t be bothered with something so foolish as a hobby when he could be tending to Amélie. Once, he had asked her to develop a few as a favor, but after she botched the first few, he rescinded the request.

“No worries,” he’d said as he rubbed her shoulders. She’d teared up at her mistake.

She rubbed her eyes. It wasn’t the ruining of the pictures she minded. It was how he’d never get to do it himself, never get through all those photographs.

The ones she hate the most are of her dancing.

There are photographs of her in school, learning with masters and looking silly while doing so. Gerard wasn’t around for that, so those were taken by her school friends. They are appropriately blown out, contrast nauseatingly high and focal point small. There are photos of her performing. Her face is clearly pale and her lips are cherry red—she played Odile. They’re all terrible, and she feels sick looking at them. As if something from the past could ever bring a cheerful memory. She should’ve known before plunging her hands into the box like a child.

They’re not from the past, though. Not really. Her last performance was a week before her kidnapping. It was a minor show with a local troupe with whom she had arranged occasional lessons. Gérard and her remoteness didn’t allow for her to go practice with a more reputable group, and she wasn’t about to go through the trouble of hiring a private instructor to keep her fresh. Hence, the amateur production. She doesn’t remember it at all, and there are no photographs of it.

She knows that if she were to go back to the time of those photographs, she wouldn’t feel sick, or at least not to the point of nausea. Stage fright, that’s all. The shivers one gets before their foot meets the matte black of the stage. Not this visceral reaction, borne from the glossy print meeting her clammy hands.

The first life she took was just like the first time she danced.

She’d been trained, of course—given the best expertise in how to move, where to watch, how to hold herself. But nothing compares to the real thing. And she’d practised the motions, moved her feet to the right positions, but until there was a weapon in her hands, until she stood before an audience, it wasn’t the same. Until the sound of her heart in her head was deafeningly loud, it couldn’t compare, and until her vision was barely two small pinpoints surrounded by black, it wouldn’t be real.

So she couldn’t really call it forgetting. Call it a transfer of skill.

The expertise was ripped from her fingers—the hard slam of her feet on the stage replaced by the butt of a gun against someone’s skull—and everything she had known came down to the raw physicality of a beating heart. The art, gone, the beauty, gone, the muscle, gone, and instead it was all choking and gore and hard metal cast through bone.

It’s hard not to think about killing people. About how her victim’s pulses flutter, how their veins pump blood, how she was just as vulnerable underneath the hot lights as they were in their factories and bunkers and embassies.

“Amélie?”

Her head rises, and her hair falls in her eyes. Satya is standing in the doorway, dressed in a white linen _shalwar kameez_ that she found on sale in an open air market. “What are you doing? You look like you’ve been crying.”

Amélie didn’t even realize, but she touches her fingers to her face and feels wetness on her cheeks.

“Nothing,” she says. “I’m fine.”

Satya doesn’t believe her, and her eyes track the taller woman’s movement. She does know she shouldn’t press and lets Amélie slip by into the hall.

That’s the thing about Satya. There’s no disappointment. Just a neutral exterior, somehow free from judgement and yet full of suggestion.

She retires to the bedroom to sleep. It doesn’t pay to sleep at the proper hours. Her earliest classes are from five to seven in the morning and her latest are from four to eleven at night, so she avoids the highest point of the sun.

And yet she’s disturbed this time. Satya crawls into bed beside her. Amélie thinks it might be bait and doesn’t roll over.

“You shouldn’t sleep this early,” Satya says. “It’s not good for your body. You won’t sleep during the night.”

“Good,” Amélie says. “That’s when interesting things happen.”

“Are you saying that because you believe it, or because that’s what they made you think?”

If joining her in bed wasn’t bait, then that certainly is. Now she’s definitely not rolling over, definitely not looking back into Satya’s knowing eyes. “I believe it well enough, and that’s where this discussion should be left.”

“I saw what you were looking at. Your old pictures. Why haven’t you taken new ones?” Satya leans down until her lips near the back of Amélie’s head, breath tickling her ear. “It’s not like you don’t dance enough.”

That’s quite enough. Amélie sits up. “Do I need a reason? Least of all one that I have to explain to you?”

Satya looks at her with a furrowed brow. “I am your partner. I would hope you would.” She bends her head towards Amélie. “I could take them, if you like.”

“I wouldn’t, actually. No one has any business taking photographs of me, dancing or singing or jumping into the Seine. Is that clear, Satya, clear enough?”

Satya nods. “Of course.”

“Good.” Amélie stares at Satya for a second longer, and the other woman returns the favor, and Amélie obliges her for a second and gets out of bed, nap over. It’s not like she could sleep after that, not with Satya’s words galloping through her head in a roundabout. _I could take them_.

People who take pictures of Amélie end up either dead or burying her empty coffin. It’s hardly something she would recommend.

Her weekend class is in the evening, and she makes the forty-five minute walk instead of the ten-minute metro so that she’s sweating hardily by the time she’s made it to the studio. Her students give their normally-composed teacher a glance, but no one asks why, and class passes uneventfully. She heads back home, taking the same long route she did before, unconcerned with the lateness of the hour or whether Satya might worry where she is.

At some point, she becomes concerned—Satya is the type to worry, and she hasn’t texted Amélie once inquiring about her whereabouts. Was what happened earlier considered a fight? Are they still in the fight, if that’s what it was? Who’s winning? It feels, Amélie thinks, like she might be winning as she walks towards the apartment, but she won’t know for sure until she’s over the threshold and Satya greets her in a cold or warm manner.

Yet when she arrives home, she isn’t greeted at all. Satya isn’t in the apartment, as indicated by the note on the fridge guaranteeing a return before ten in the evening but not before nine. It’s ten-thirty. The note gives no indication of where the other woman was headed, or why, or how she intended to find something to do in Paris at nine o’clock on a Sunday when everyone’s primary concern was smoking on their balcony. Satya doesn’t smoke.

Amélie is worried now. She sends Satya a text but doesn’t get a reply. She is so caught up in her worry that for ten minutes she doesn’t notice the living room has been completely rearranged, the couches and chairs pushed to the corners of the room so that only the rug remains in the middle. Amélie doesn’t recall Satya having a particular interest in _feng-shui_ _—_ the arrangement is therefore coming off as confusing and baseless.

She grabs a bottle of wine and a glass and falls asleep drinking in one of the pushed-aside chairs. She isn’t sure how long she sleeps, but eventually Satya shakes her awake. “I told you, cherie. You can’t even get through a glass of wine, now.”

“I could if I wanted to,” Amélie says, sitting up. “Where did you go? You didn’t respond to my message.”

“I was going to borrow something from a friend.”

“At this hour? You should’ve let me come with you. What friend, in which neighborhood?”

“Angela. You know where she lives, don’t be silly.” She pulls a tape from her jacket. “I went to get this.”

Amélie inspects the cover, squinting, then takes the tape. “ _Pastimes_ ,” she says monotonically. “What is this?”

“A tape. For music.”

Amélie glares. “I gathered that. What sort of music, and why did you trek halfway across the city to get it when we could’ve found it online?”

Satya rolls her eyes. “It’s not the same. You said that, when you talked about that orchestra you saw live.”

Amélie shakes her head. “That was a long time ago. Something I remembered offhand. I wouldn’t set foot in a symphony now.”

“I’m well aware.” Satya kisses Amélie’s forehead before she can protest. “Go put this in. I believe Angela recommended track four.”

Satya was wrong about one thing. Amélie had far more than one glass of wine. Getting to her feet is a small struggle, the room stirring beneath her feet, but she manages to put one foot before the other until she reaches the old stereo they miraculously still have (neither Amélie nor Angela have any idea where Satya snatched it up from). She slides it in and thumbs the buttons inexpertly until the machine obeys her uncertain commands and music floods the room.

Before she can turn and speak to Satya again, arms are winding around her waist. “I never see you dance,” Satya says.

Amélie’s heart squeezes uncomfortably in her chest. “So that’s what this is about. You could always come to the studio.”

“And see you all tense? No, this is better. You’ll be different when you dance at home.”

“How can you say that when you’ve never seen me dance?” She shakes her head. “And this is a waltz. I teach ballet.”

“Are you so inefficient at every other genre?” Satya lets Amélie go so she can turn to face her partner. “Surely dance has to be somewhat of a greater scope of study. I don’t pretend to know ballet, but surely you’d have some grasp of the general movements.”

“I wouldn’t claim to know your type of dance any better than you would claim to know mine. I did not spend years studying the waltz. I fairly pity those who would feel the need to.”

Satya isn’t breaking their eye contact. “Just dance with me.”

Amélie lets herself be pulled forward. The dance is too fast for her liking and the living room is too cramped. Amélie’s old dance partner was taller than her, a dramatic feat to accomplish given her height of slightly more than 1.8 meters. Satya stands at only 1.7, making them a fairly striking couple but a fairly awkward dance pair. They sway and twirl in restraint, scared of clipping their ankles on the disorganized furniture.

Amélie can feel Satya’s eyes on her. The taller woman refuses to make eye contact and keeps her eyes firmly on the floor. It doesn’t improve things; it’s four minutes of awkwardness. It feels like something they should’ve done on their first or second date when either of them had no inclination of the nuances of their bodies, when their lips had never met. Now it’s simply unnecessary, Amélie thinks.

The song ends and rolls over into silence. Amélie reaches over to the sideboard and presses the eject button. When she turns back, Satya has crossed her arms.

“I’m not going to lie and say I enjoyed that,” Amélie says.

“I am grateful for your honesty,” Satya says.

Amélie shakes her head. “You can’t force me to dance happily, let alone to a genre I have no affection for.”

“As I just learned. But you cannot force yourself to be miserable either.”

“I’ve forced nothing! _They_ forced everything. Took me out of my own mind.” She shakes her head like she’s attempting to dislodge the thought. “It isn’t my fault that something I used to enjoy has new meaning. A worse meaning.”

“Then why do you surround yourself with it? Teach it? Look at old photographs of it? You certainly don’t seem to be helping your case. If you don’t attempt to enjoy it, then what are you doing besides punishing yourself?”

Amélie shakes her head again, angrily this time. Satya sighs. “I know that isn’t what you wanted to hear. I felt the same when I fled Vishkar. But I love you, and it simply is not in my interest to let you rot in Talon’s shadow, letting them eat at you far after you have been released from their control. Is this a reasonable statement?”

“Yes,” Amélie says. “Fairly reasonable.”

“Good,” Satya says. “Things are different now. You can’t regain what they took, that is true. But you can make new memories over the old ones. I have had to do this, and I’ll help you do the same. Or at least, I can try too.”

“I don’t want to try,” she tells Satya. “I’m tired.”

“I know.”

“I want my old life back,” Amélie says.

“You don’t want that,” Satya says. “Then you would not have me.”

“Yes,” Amélie says. “And what a horror that would be.”

Satya sighs again. _“Amélie.”_

Amélie doesn’t apologize, but she does step forward and gather Satya into her arms. “I’m joking. And I know it frustrates you that we haven’t talked about this new life of mine before. But if you are willing to stand by me, then, well—I’m not going to stop you.” She hesitates. “Even if it means indulging your new habit of frivolous dances.”

She can feel Satya smile as her lover’s whole body relaxes. “Good. I will pick something better next time.”

Amélie rubs between Satya’s shoulderblades. “It’s late. We could go to bed. My choice of dance this time.” Her fingers stray lower, to Satya’s lower back, just above the hem of her linen pants. “I think you’d enjoy it.”

“I think I would as well,” Satya says.

They don’t leave the apartment for days, but the sweet sound of music leaves the windows throughout.

**Author's Note:**

> ty to haxan for giving me a great prompt and for beta'ing! "amelie rediscovers how she feels about dancing, with satya's help." (something along those lines, i don't have the original message anymore lmao)


End file.
